Re: Same font size for lyrics and markup

[David Kastrup]

Kieren MacMillan <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi David K,
>
>> And remove the utterly pointless
>> 
>>  \context {
>>    \Global
>>    \grobdescriptions #all-grob-descriptions
>>  }
>
> 1. Interesting! This is what I was specifically told to do by Mike
> S. Was it necessary in an earlier version, but not now?

It is not in any way related to the code you posted.  Since I am not
privy to your communications with Mike, I cannot vouch for any earlier
versions he might have written using different mechanisms.

At any rate, it redefines all grob definitions in the global context to
the values they are set to anyway.  It would be "pointless" if it did an
operation related to the task at hand but already catered for by the
system.

In this case, however, it is "utterly pointless" since it is not merely
a task the system does on its own anyway, but since it is a task
completely unrelated to the rest of the code.

I have no idea why Mike would "specifically tell you" in relation to
this code to put this in.  I would suspect either a copy&paste error on
his part or you mixing up instructions for two different problems or at
least two different solutions.

> 2. In the future, perhaps leave out the utterly useless word “utterly”
> from your otherwise helpful answers; it’ll go a long way to keeping
> the spirit of the list above the dirt. An equally effective — and much
> more positive — answer would have been “And remove the unnecessary”,
> which even would have saved you six keystrokes as a bonus.

You probably would not believe the amount of problems caused by the
cruft people collect into their personal files based on what they
believe someone told them to be a good idea.  In addition for setting up
people for problems later on, it also spreads the firm belief that a
program like LilyPond is inherently incomprehensible and will only react
to hand-waving by the right people.

Also it leads to "I have not upgraded program x because then my code
stops working" phenomenon since having code in your program that is
merely useless in one version is no guarantee that it will not cause
breakage in the next.  Because the programmers cannot possibly
anticipate every kind of code that might have been put in for good luck.

I'm spending most of my time and efforts beating sense into LilyPond and
its documentation, so I tend to be less than trilled if I see it walk
out the open back gate again.

-- 
David Kastrup